Seeing the C Ring

The Cassini spacecraft views the gauzy C ring of Saturn, with the cloud-streaked planet providing a dramatic backdrop.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 32 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 5, 2008. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.5 million kilometers (960,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-ring-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 46 degrees. Image scale is about 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute